Immigration and the Great War: How World War I Closed America's Open Door

A 1917 poster urging immigrants to support the war effort. Library of Congress.

The end of an era

The First World War ended one of the largest waves of immigration in American history. In the decade before the war, an average of 1 million immigrants a year arrived, about three-quarters of them through the Ellis Island immigration station in New York Harbor.

Until then, the U.S. had an "open door" policy, with no limit on numbers. Newcomers only had to pass a medical and legal inspection showing they wouldn't be a danger or a burden — and 98% of those arriving at Ellis Island passed.

Fleeing Europe

Many Americans valued immigrants' labor and weren't troubled by ethnic diversity; others resented the numbers arriving. The turmoil leading up to the war drove more people out of parts of Europe:

• refugees from Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Turkey fled the Balkan Wars;
• Russians fled the unrest that would become the Russian Revolution;
• Jews fled anti-Semitic pogroms across eastern Europe;
• others left to escape the long compulsory military service many European countries required of men.

Travel becomes dangerous

When war broke out, crossing the Atlantic became harder and riskier, even as more refugees tried to escape. British, French, German and Italian liners that had carried immigrants were turned into troop and cargo transports and hospital ships. Ships still in service faced submarine warfare: Germany felt justified in attacking vessels that might carry military supplies to Britain and France — as in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915.

Immigration fell to a trickle — just 110,618 people in 1918, against an average of nearly 1 million. Those who came faced more than the dangers of the voyage: some failed inspection but couldn't be sent home because of the war. So many were stranded this way that officials created parole procedures, so they wouldn't be held in federal facilities for the rest of the war.

Suspicion at home

The war hardened anti-immigrant feeling, even though many immigrants served honorably in the U.S. armed forces.

• Stories of German atrocities, real and exaggerated, turned people against German Americans, and many immigrants hid their heritage.
• Irish immigrants came under suspicion, since some Irish nationalists backed Germany, hoping a British defeat would bring Irish independence.
• Russian immigrants were feared as anarchists and communists as the "Red Scare" took hold with the Russian Revolution.

Rising isolationism and nativism would soon close America's "golden door" after the war ended.

Sources

Based on "Immigration and the Great War," National Park Service, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty National Monument; a work of the United States government in the public domain.